Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Okay, got it. You just took me through a bit of the pricing and ROI analysis. What did you price your product at?

Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, you got to prototype in a bootstrapping with a paycheck mode. Your two co-founders who were doing the design and implementation work, stayed on working in a bootstrapping with a paycheck mode. You quit and went full-time. Then you got to a release in June of the next year, in six months. Which side did you decide to build the product for? Was it the buy side?

Ganesh Shankar: No, the sell side.

Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Got it. Let’s go back to when you started the company. What was the premise of the company? What were you going to do?

Three Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck, Now at Over $50M Revenue: Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive (Part 1)

Ganesh and his two co-founders have built Responsive with a very small amount of capital.
They started by Bootstrapping with a Paycheck. Excellent execution, much to learn on many issues.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a Freemium Business Using a Paycheck

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Aytekin Tank, Founder and CEO of JotForm, is a Turkish entrepreneur who bootstrapped his company with a paycheck. When we spoke in 2015, he was using a freemium business model, and a virtual team strategy to scale.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Aytekin Tank: I was born in Istanbul. I spent my childhood moving from city to city since my family worked for the government. Constantly having to adapt and make friends instilled in me an appreciation for different cultures and meeting new people. We have offices in San Francisco and in Turkey. We have remote workers in 20 countries.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Co-founders Bootstrapped with a Paycheck to Exit

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

One Click Ventures Co-founders Angie Stocklin and her husband built a portfolio of e-commerce businesses using a very unusual strategy. I had a lot of fun learning about their journey back in 2016, and hope you will as well. One Click Internet Ventures was acquired by Foster Grant, International in July of 2018.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Angie Stocklin: I was born in a small town called Paisley in Indiana. It’s a town of about 2,500. My mom was a teacher and my dad is a farmer and somewhat of an entrepreneur in the fact that farming is a self-employed type of business. My dad and his brothers owned an implement dealership. They sold tractors. I grew up with a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. I went to college at the University of Evansville and started studying Psychology. I went on to get my Masters and my educational specialist degree in School Psychology. I worked as a school psychologist for three years before starting One Click.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a SaaS Business with a Paycheck and Scaled

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

I love doing stories of entrepreneurs who are long-time readers of the 1Mby1M blog. Kovai CEO Saravana Kumar is one of them. This is a wonderful story from 2020 of how he scaled a SaaS company from Coimbatore!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the beginning of your journey. Where were you born and raised? What kind of background did you have?

Saravana Kumar: I was born and brought up in India. I was from a city called Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. After finishing my master’s in 2000, I got an opportunity to work in London. I took my exam on a Friday and I got the job on Monday morning in London.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Wonderful Bootstrapped with a Paycheck Story

If you haven’t already, please study our free Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

This is a wonderful bootstrapping with a paycheck story of a really smart, scrappy entrepreneur, Suuchi Ramesh, Founder CEO of Suuchi.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Suuchi Ramesh: I was born in India. I spent the first 15 years in Madras, which is Chennai now. My family is in Bangalore, so I went to school in Bangalore. I’m a software engineer. Bangalore has a lot of great technology companies. I came to the United States on a tech job.

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